Kate Didd

What the absolute fuck is life?

That’s the question echoing in my skull as I sit in the parking lot of a therapist’s office I am currently attending three days a week like it’s a part-time job where the dress code is emotional excavation and the pay is existential confusion.

And it’s not even my appointment.

So I sit there, staring at the windshield like it’s a movie screen and my brain is the projector throwing up scenes faster than I can process them.

Who am I?

What am I doing here?

What am I discovering?

What am I going to accomplish?

What am I going to push for?

Who am I going to be?

What am I going to be known for?

What story am I writing?

It’s a million questions at once, and my brain is pacing like a caged tiger chewing on the bars.

The annoying part is that my mind doesn’t just think.

My mind thinks about thinking.

It builds elaborate plots the way other people make grocery lists. Whole narratives. Characters. Roles. Emotional arcs.

And when one of the stories stops working?

Scrap it.

Throw it out.

Start again.

Like a screenwriter tossing a bad draft into the trash.

The dangerous thing is… I realized recently I’ve done that with people too.

If the story doesn’t work, I rewrite the cast.

I didn’t realize how sharp that blade could be.

Because the truth is, I like stories.

I like being in them.

Give me a role and I will play it.

Hero?

Sure. I’ll stand up straight, take the hit, protect the room.

Villain?

Oh, reader beware.

My villainy isn’t theatrical. It’s calculated and quiet and a little too self-aware.

The problem is I don’t see reality the way everyone else seems to.

My pain got so big at one point that my brain did something strange.

It stepped outside the theater.

Instead of feeling the play, I started watching it.

Pain. Joy. Rage. Love.

They became… plot devices.

And honestly?

I had a pretty good time with it.

But there are three people who don’t get the experimental version of me.

My kids.

They get the hero.

Every single day, like clockwork.

The version of me that shows up.

Feeds them.

Holds the structure.

Keeps the lights on emotionally and physically.

Even on days when my internal world feels like static.

Because their story deserves that.

They deserve the girl who became a mother and grew up in real time.

Even if I’m still figuring out the rest of the script.

The quieter I get, the more I realize something uncomfortable.

My story is darker than I usually allow people to see.

There are things that happened to me that I cannot describe out loud.

Not because I’m dramatic.

Because trying to say them makes the air hurt in my lungs.

My brain does this strange thing when it approaches those memories.

It shows me a visual.

I see myself standing outside my own body.

Calmly.

Like a mechanic.

I unscrew the top of my head, pull my brain out, rinse it under the sink like a dusty engine part, set it back in place, close everything up.

No scars.

Just… reset.

Not good.

Not bad.

Just washed.

Neutral.

Refreshed.

Like someone hit the refresh button on a corrupted operating system.

And that’s the strange feeling I’m in right now.

It’s new.

It’s unfamiliar.

There’s no pain.

But there’s also no joy.

Just discernment.

A calm middle ground where everything is observed but nothing quite hooks into my nervous system the way it used to.

And weirdly enough, science says this isn’t as unusual as it feels.

Researchers studying Complex Post‑Traumatic Stress Disorder especially work coming out of places like Stanford University and Harvard University have documented something interesting about brains that have spent years surviving trauma.

For a long time, trauma wires the brain to live in hyper-emotion.

The amygdala, your brain’s alarm system, fires constantly. Everything is danger. Everything is intense. Pain and attachment get braided together until your nervous system doesn’t know the difference.

But when someone finally starts processing that trauma, when therapy and safety begin to untangle those circuits, something strange can happen.

The emotional intensity can drop so suddenly that the brain enters a temporary state researchers sometimes describe as emotional flattening or protective numbness.

Not because the person is broken.

Because the nervous system is recalibrating.

Imagine living next to a fire alarm that screamed for twenty years.

Then one day someone turns it off.

The silence doesn’t feel peaceful at first.

It feels eerie.

The brain also reduces activity in areas tied to emotional memory while the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for observation and reasoning, starts taking more control.

Which means instead of feeling the storm…

You start watching the weather.

And sometimes there’s grief in that too.

Because healing from trauma often means letting go not only of the pain people caused you but also the good moments with those same people.

Your brain can’t keep the emotional attachment to someone while also fully accepting the harm they did.

So it loosens the entire knot.

And suddenly the highs and the lows dissolve together.

That kind of grief is strange.

You’re not losing a person in the present.

You’re releasing the emotional gravity they once had over your past.

Which might explain the gym this morning.

I stood there with a barbell over my head.

Or at least… I was supposed to.

My husband came over to spot me.

I tried.

Nothing moved.

Not one rep.

It wasn’t weakness.

It felt like the command from my brain to my body got lost in the mail.

The weights weren’t available after that set anyway, so I shrugged and skipped it.

“I’ll hit that tomorrow,” I told myself.

Because everything felt slightly… unreal.

Like I was acting out a scene for a future version of me watching the playback.

My husband was there.

The gym was real.

But the moment had this strange, digital shimmer to it.

Like I’d accidentally stepped halfway into the Matrix and nobody else noticed.

I look around and see people in my environment.

That must mean this reality is correct.

Right?

Or maybe my brain is glitching and I’m placing people in the wrong scene.

I genuinely can’t tell sometimes.

And then there’s the demon.

Not metaphorically.

Visually.

Emotionally.

I see it sometimes in my mind like a separate entity strapped to my back.

All the rage.

All the hatred.

All the pain.

A creature that once controlled the steering wheel of my life.

Now it’s chained.

I’m dragging it behind me like a reluctant pet.

Leash loosely wrapped around my hand.

And the strangest part?

I don’t feel sorry for it anymore.

I see its suffering.

But I’m detached from it.

Which raises a question I haven’t answered yet.

Does that make me more dangerous?

Or less?

I’m not sure.

Maybe it’s neither.

Maybe this is just the moment in the story where the main character realizes the monster and the girl were never separate things.

Just different survival settings.

Maybe this numbness isn’t emptiness.

Maybe it’s the quiet moment when the brain stops running the old software and hasn’t installed the new one yet.

The loading screen between timelines.

The part of healing nobody warns you about.

Because they tell you about the pain.

They tell you about the breakthroughs.

But they never mention the weird middle chapter where you feel like you’ve stepped through a portal and landed in a reality that looks identical to the last one, except you are not the same person living inside it.

And now you have to build a new self from scratch.

New rules.

New values.

New ways to feel.

Which is terrifying.

But also…

Kind of fascinating.

Because everything that made me who I am, every terrible thing, every beautiful thing, every lesson carved into bone, led me here.

To a quiet parking lot.

To a brain that’s rebooting.

To a woman sitting in the driver’s seat realizing something strange about existence.

We are all just fragments of the same energy moving through different bodies, different timelines, different stories.

Every villain.

Every hero.

Every girl in a parking lot wondering what the hell is happening to her.

Connected.

Imagine that.